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>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience? IME, yes. I'm curr

>Is Azure really this unreliable? There are concrete numbers in this blog. For those who use Azure, does it match your external experience? IME, yes. I'm currently working as an SRE supporting a large environment across AWS, Azure, and GCP. In terms of issues or incidents we deal with that are directly caused by cloud provider problems, I'd estimate that 80-90% come from Azure. And we're _really_ not doing anything that complicated in terms of cloud infrastructure; just VMs, load balancers, some blob storage, some k8s clusters. Stuff on Azure just breaks constantly, and when it does break it's very obvious that Azure: 1. Does not know when they're having problems (it can take weeks/months for Azure to admit they had an outage that impacted us) 2. Does not know why they had problems (RCAs we're given are basically just "something broke") 3. Does not care that they had problems Everyone I work with who interacts with Azure at all absolutely loathes it.

chris_money202 6mo ago
But doesn’t this experience contradict what OP is saying in a way. If azure is always breaking wouldn’t that imply that changes like “adding smart pointers” are being introduced into the codebase?
- andyg_blog 6mo ago
  I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).
  - chris_money202 6mo ago
    That's a generalized statement. Smart pointers can stabilize things, if used wrongly they can cause just as many issues. Sprinkling in smart pointers such that there is now mixed use with smart and raw pointers can cause double frees, and huge maintenance issues. So, creating a single PR to introduce smart pointers in my opinion is not necessarily "stability". He should have created an architecture plan and got upstream and downstream aligned.
    - andyg_blog 6mo ago
      Completely agree on alignment. Without it, it's a shortcut to rejection. I actually wrote a lot about this in a blog post I called "Minimum Reviewable Unit" https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable-unit/ https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable...

chris_money202 6mo ago

But doesn’t this experience contradict what OP is saying in a way. If azure is always breaking wouldn’t that imply that changes like “adding smart pointers” are being introduced into the codebase?

andyg_blog 6mo ago
I don't think it contradicts the OP. OP says the system is unreliable. Memory leaks that lead to out of memory failures for example. Smart pointers would stabilize things. (Also note that OP says their smart pointers PR was rejected).
- chris_money202 6mo ago
  That's a generalized statement. Smart pointers can stabilize things, if used wrongly they can cause just as many issues. Sprinkling in smart pointers such that there is now mixed use with smart and raw pointers can cause double frees, and huge maintenance issues. So, creating a single PR to introduce smart pointers in my opinion is not necessarily "stability". He should have created an architecture plan and got upstream and downstream aligned.
  - andyg_blog 6mo ago
    Completely agree on alignment. Without it, it's a shortcut to rejection. I actually wrote a lot about this in a blog post I called "Minimum Reviewable Unit" https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable-unit/ https://gieseanw.wordpress.com/2025/03/21/minimum-reviewable...